Already under stress after getting engaged to a woman he doesn't want to marry, George's mental state gets even worse when his fiancee makes friends with Elaine, threatening his strictly compartmentalised lifestyle and prompting him to speak in the third person: Worlds are colliding!

As his granddaughter K.M. Elisabeth Murray wrote in Caught in the Web of Words, “because he never compartmentalised his interests, he never missed seeing something because he had allowed himself to become preoccupied with another line of research.”